Through The Glass
by spaceburgers
Summary: Human AU; wherein Arthur is your average company employee, Alfred is the window cleaner who wipes the windows of his office building every Wednesday, and they find an unlikely way to communicate through the glass.


**A/N: **Inspired by this picture from pixiv (mayonnaize . tumblr (dotcom) / post / 33708678527 / monster-magic).

* * *

Arthur Kirkland worked as a perfectly average employee at a perfectly average company in a perfectly average office building and had a perfectly average salary.

In other words, he had a boring office job.

Every morning he dragged himself out of bed and onto the subway, mulling over the things that needed to be done and the annoying co-workers who needed to be ignored, and when he reached his destination he would walk the few blocks to his workplace, take the lift up to the sixth floor, sit down at his cubicle, turn on his computer, and begin yet another perfectly average day.

There was only one thing he liked about his work, quite frankly, and that was the fact that he had the luck to have his cubicle positioned right next to the window, and so it gave him a prime view of the busy London streets below him. Sometimes he would find himself staring outside absently, watching the people scurry about below him; places to go, people to meet, leading lives that were probably ten times more interesting than his.

That was what he was thinking that one Wednesday morning, staring out the window absently, lost in his own thoughts, when suddenly he was face-to-face with a pair of bright blue eyes.

The shock of it nearly caused him to jump right out of his seat, but somehow he managed to stay frozen in place as those eyes stared right back at him. He blinked, came back to his senses, and it was only then that he realized who the owner of those eyes were: there was a man outside his window on the sixth floor—a window cleaner, window wiper in hand and a bucket placed precariously next to him, as he sat dangling from the scaffolding suspended from the top of the building.

There was a long moment as the two men simply stared at each other. Arthur noted the messy blond locks peeking out from underneath his cap; blue eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses that looked like they were at risk of sliding right off his nose at any nose—

Then the window cleaner grinned, waved, mouthed something, and promptly disappeared from view.

Arthur stared at the space that had formally contained one rather (admittedly) good looking window cleaner just a few moments ago for a while, before finally shaking his head, snapping himself out of his trance, and forcing himself to get back to work.

That was day one.

* * *

Arthur didn't see him again for a week. He came to the conclusion that the cleaners' services were only required on a weekly basis.

This time he had been so immersed in his work, typing away furiously on his keyboard that he hadn't noticed the man's presence at all. It was only when he heard a knock on the window that he finally looked up.

There he was, in all his blond-hair blue-eyed goofy-grin glory, sitting cross-legged on the scaffolding.

In front of him, messily scrawled on the window in some sort of ink that Arthur hoped to god was erasable, were words:

_Hi, I'm Alfred!_

Next to it a rather lopsided smiley face had been drawn.

Arthur blinked. There was a very long moment where he just stared at the words, stunned. Then without thinking, he grabbed a scrap piece of paper from his desk, reached for a marker, and wrote down a reply in large font:

_Don't you have a job to do?_

He held it up for the man (_his name is Alfred_, he thought) to see, and received a silent laugh through the glass in response.

Alfred wiped the ink away with a cloth (_so it _was _erasable, thank god) _and, retrieving a marker from his pocket, took a considerable amount of effort writing the letters backward on his side so they read right from Arthur's perspective:

_Don't you have one too? :P_

Arthur rolled his eyes, but before he could reply, Alfred had erased the letters and had written something else:

_You still haven't told me your name._

Arthur hesitated, marker in hand, casting a look at that smiling face through the glass of his office window, before putting his marker on paper, ignoring the heat he felt building up on his cheeks, and held his reply up again.

_Arthur. My name is Arthur._

* * *

Weeks of this strange silent conversation passed.

Arthur found himself glancing at the clock every Wednesday, waiting for the familiar knock on his windowpane to alert him of Alfred's presence. It was a strange relationship—not really friends, but more than acquaintances at the same time. Hell, he didn't even know what Alfred's voice sounded like. And, quite honestly, the conversations were mostly one-sided; he truly had not a single clue how Alfred was able to find a new conversation topic every single week.

Once it was _what's your favorite band? _And they had a silent argument about the correct way to spell the word _favourite_, which eventually moved on to an argument about the degradation of the music industry.

Another time it was _who's your favorite Avenger? _And Alfred was so appalled that Arthur had neither read the comics nor watched the movie that he nearly toppled his bucket right off the scaffolding to the ground six stories below.

As strange as the situation was, and as much as Arthur refused to admit it, he did come to look forward to these small snatches of conversation that punctuated his otherwise dull week.

Yet, despite the fact that Arthur knew a hundred random facts about Alfred, from his nationality to his favorite movies to his preference in music, he felt like he didn't know the man at all.

He knew he really shouldn't be bothered about it. It wasn't a big deal. This… _relationship_, whatever it was, was simply a distraction from the mundane office life that he hated so much. It wasn't like Alfred _meant_ anything to him or anything, wasn't an old friend or a neighbour or a colleague, he was simply a man who cleaned the windows of his office building and happened to have a strange fascination with holding written conversations with him through glass. If anything it was honestly just very, very odd and… to Alfred this was probably just a game as well, cleaning windows for a living couldn't be particularly exciting…

But he _was _bothered by it. So much so that whenever he spaced out, he would find thoughts like these worming their way into his mind. And that Wednesday, Arthur found himself trapped in those thoughts again as the now-familiar knock came. He lifted his head from his paperwork, eyes narrowed as Alfred grinned his usual grin, a new question scrawled messily on the glass that Arthur couldn't care to answer today. He held up the following words instead:

_I don't know anything about you._

He watched as Alfred's grin slid right off his face; his expression grew unexpectedly serious, and through the glass, blue eyes met green. Arthur felt his heart squeeze painfully in his chest as Alfred wrote his reply, handwriting becoming disheveled and some of his letters written backwards in his haste.

_What do you mean?_

Arthur hesitated, refusing to look up as he penned down his reply.

_Apart from your first name and some of your strange interests, I don't know anything about you. I haven't even held a decent conversation with you. Isn't this just a way for both of us to kill time on our respective mundane jobs?_

For a long time Arthur refused to lift his gaze. When he finally mustered up the courage to do so, the reply on the glass took him by complete surprise.

_What's your number?_

Arthur blinked. Alfred was still staring at him with narrowed eyes, expression completely unreadable.

Slowly, he wrote the numbers on a sheet of paper and held it up, looking down at his desk the whole time.

The sound of his phone ringing abruptly broke the suffocating silence, and he hastily leant over to pick it up, but when he brought it to his ear, the voice on the line was unfamiliar, strongly accented with an American influence.

"My full name is Alfred Foster Jones. I'm turning 22 on July 4th. I majored in Physics. This is just a temporary job to pay the bills while I look for something better. I was born in New York but I moved here to the UK when I was a teenager with my parents. People say I'm friendly and easy-going, but at the same time I'm loud and obnoxious and can't read the atmosphere to save my life, and I have a thing for green eyes with bushy eyebrows, but I didn't know that until I saw you that day, so what time do you get off work tomorrow?"

Arthur's throat suddenly felt very, very dry, and all the blood in his body seemed to have flooded to his face all at once. Slowly, he turned to the window, where Alfred was leaning forward, one hand pressed against the glass, the other hand gripping a mobile phone to his ear.

"I…" Arthur tried to speak, but his voice came out strangled, and he had to cough and clear his throat before he tried again. "…Alfred?"

"You have a nice voice," he said wistfully, and through the window Arthur could see the corners of his lips lift upwards in the tiniest of smiles.

"…I get off work at six," Arthur mumbled, and instantly Alfred's face lit up with one of his signature mega-watt grins, and when Alfred spoke up, his voice was coloured with obvious relief.

"I'll be waiting outside the building."

Arthur nodded slowly, the surrealism of the situation starting to sink in.

_What on earth had just happened?_

"See you."

Alfred grinned, flashed him a thumbs-up, and was still grinning madly, a light flush on his cheeks as he disappeared from view.

For a long, long moment, Arthur just sat slumped in his seat, still clutching his phone, his free hand clamped over his mouth as he tried his best to cool his cheeks and figure out what had just transpired in a matter of minutes.

All of a sudden he picked up his phone, dialing Alfred's number.

"Hello?"

"Alfred, you forgot to erase your writing."

There was loud cursing on the other end of the line, and abruptly it went dead, the dial tone left beeping in Arthur's ear.

It didn't take long before Alfred came into view again, smiling embarrassedly. He mouthed something that Arthur guessed was supposed to be _sorry_. Grimacing, he waved at him dismissively before turning back to his paperwork, trying to clear his head and wipe the flush from his cheeks with the tedium of facts and figures.

Then there was a knock on the window again, and when he looked up, the words were gone, only to be replaced by the outline of a heart framing Alfred's face as he grinned at Arthur through the window.

And that pretty much completely trampled on any hope of clearing his head, as Arthur, turning a very deep shade of red, scrunched up a piece of paper into a ball and flung it forcefully at the window, landing squarely where Alfred's nose was and bouncing off the glass pane to land on the floor forlornly.

Alfred laughed, blew a kiss, and then he was gone, leaving a very flustered and very embarrassed Arthur with his face flat on the table, wondering how on earth a chance encounter with a certain window cleaner could have ended up like _this_.


End file.
